There is a child sitting in a classroom right now who is not okay. You would not know it by looking at her. She is quiet, she does her work, she does not cause trouble. But something is happening to her at home, on the way to school, somewhere in the spaces between the parts of her day that adults can see. She knows it is wrong. Some part of her wants to tell someone. But she looks around and she cannot find the person to tell. Not because no one is there. But because she has never been shown that any of them are safe to tell.
So she stays quiet. And the thing that is happening to her keeps happening.
This is the reality for far more children in Nigeria than most of us are comfortable admitting. And the tragedy is not just that harm exists, harm has always existed in the world. The tragedy is that we have not built the structures that give children a way out of it. We have not created the environments where a child feels safe enough to speak, confident enough to reach out, and certain enough that something will actually be done.
When we talk about safe spaces for children, it is easy to think only in physical terms, a building, a fence, a security guard at the gate. And yes, physical safety matters. But a safe space for a child is much more than that. It is an environment where a child knows they will be believed. Where the adults around them have been taught to listen without judgment and respond without making things worse. Where the culture of silence that surrounds so much of what children experience in this country has been deliberately and consistently broken down.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of the places we assume are safe for children are not. Home is supposed to be the safest place, and for many children it is. But for others, home is exactly where the harm is coming from. School is supposed to be a place of learning and growth, and in many cases it is. But schools can also be places where bullying goes unchecked, where teachers use punishment that crosses into abuse, where a child’s dignity is stripped in front of their peers and no one intervenes. Religious institutions, community gatherings, even extended family settings, all of these can be places of warmth and belonging, and all of them can also be places where a child is quietly suffering while the adults around them look the other way.
This happens for several reasons. In many Nigerian communities, there is a deeply embedded culture of not interfering in other people’s homes or families. There is a tendency to normalize certain kinds of treatment of children, harsh discipline, dismissal of a child’s feelings, the expectation that children should endure and not complain. There is also a lack of education around what abuse actually looks like. Many adults genuinely do not recognise certain behaviours as harmful because those behaviours were normalised in their own childhoods. And so the cycle continues, not always out of malice, but out of a gap in awareness that no one has taken responsibility for closing.
Children themselves are rarely taught that they have rights. That their bodies belong to them. That certain things that happen to them are not their fault and are not something they have to accept. That there are people they can tell and things that can be done. This kind of education, simple, direct, aand age-appropriate, can be the difference between a child who suffers in silence for years and a child who speaks up before the damage becomes permanent.
Creating safe spaces for children requires everyone to play a role. It requires parents and caregivers who are willing to examine the way they were raised and make conscious decisions to do differently. It requires schools that go beyond academics and take seriously their responsibility to the whole child, their emotional safety, their dignity, their right to exist in that space without fear. It requires communities that stop treating the welfare of children as someone else’s problem and start understanding that every child in that community is a shared responsibility. And it requires organisations that create structured, consistent programmes, not one-off events, that builds awareness, train adults, and give children the language and the confidence to speak.
At Oselobua Family Foundation, we believe that child safety is not a topic for occasional conversation. It is a foundation. Everything else we want for children: their education, their development, their future, sits on top of it. A child who does not feel safe cannot learn. A child who has no one to turn to cannot grow into who they are meant to be. Safety is not a luxury. It is the starting point.
So where do we start? We start by deciding that the silence is no longer acceptable. We start by having the conversations we have been avoiding. We start by building in our homes, our schools, our communities the kind of environment where every child knows that they matter, that they are seen, and that they do not have to face anything alone.
That is where we start. And we start now.